Skip to main content

Home/ Long Game/ Group items tagged science

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
anonymous

Millennials keep their chins up despite high unemployment in economic downturn - 0 views

www.csmonitor.com/...mployment-in-economic-downturn

generations

shared by anonymous on 19 May 10 - Cached
  • For one, the recession, while the deepest since the Great Depression, is not dragging on so long that all hope of finding a good job has evaporated. For another, there's a decent government safety net now, in the form of food stamps and unemployment benefits. Millennials, moreover, seem destined to become the most educated generation ever and see themselves as having a lot on the ball. And let's not forget the soft landing provided by parents, widely considered the most overprotective, don't-cut-the-apron-strings cohort of parents in US history.
anonymous

All evolution, all the time - 0 views

www.nature.com/...news.2010.260.html

layscience

shared by anonymous on 26 May 10 - Cached
  • Take childhood education. If you look at hunter-gatherer societies, there is very little that resembles formal education. Education takes the form of play, and adults provide explicit instructions more or less when asked. And yet this spontaneous education system is not only not exploited by formal education, it is subverted.
  • The empirical evidence points to substantial group-level benefits for most enduring religions. Benefits include defining the group, coordinating action to achieve shared goals and developing elaborate mechanisms to prevent cheating. The same evolutionary processes that cause individual organisms and social insect colonies to function as adaptive units also cause religious groups to function as adaptive units. Religious believers frequently compare their communities to a single body or a beehive. This is not just a poetic metaphor but turns out to be correct from an evolutionary perspective.
  • They are ignoring the scientific theory and evidence for the "secular utility" of religion, as Émile Durkheim put it, even though they wrap themselves in the mantle of science and rationality. Someone needs to call them out on that, and that person is me.
  • anonymous on 26 May 10
     
    May 25, 2010
anonymous

Rand and Empirical Responsibility 13 - 0 views

aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/...pirical-responsibility-13.html

objectivism criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 15 Feb 11 - Cached
  • How, for example, does she know that intellectual appeasement is merely an attempt to apologize for being concerned about intellectual matters? Where would she get such a notion? Where on earth does she come up with the idea that intellectual appeasement involves an "escape from loneliness"? What evidence does she have that such is the case?
  • “Tribalism is … a logical consequence of modern philosophy.” This is a specific application of Rand's theory of history. The trouble with such statements is that, because they are so broad and sweeping, they can neither be corroborated or refuted by empirical evidence.
  • it is far more plausible to suppose that tribalism is a hard-wired feature of human nature, prominent in many human beings, and only weaker or non-existent within the exceptional few.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Philosophy, as Nietzsche noticed more than hundred years ago and which cognitive science and experimental psychology continues to corroborate, often degenerates into a mere rationalization of the the desires, sentiments, and interests that afflict various strains of human nature.
  • anonymous on 15 Feb 11
     
    "Rand, despite her cluelessness about human nature, nevertheless couldn't help tossing off wildly speculative remarks about the more obscure motivations of the human animal."
anonymous

5 Reasons Humanity Is Terrible at Democracy | Cracked.com - 0 views

www.cracked.com/-terrible-at-democracy_p2.html

shared by anonymous on 24 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Polls consistently show that we think those who disagree with us politically are simply bad people, on a personal level.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 24 Mar 11
       
      What's fascinating is how irrelevant our partisan political affiliations are, on a day to day basis, but oh how we imagine them to be the center of our being.
  • Now take a look at this study, which compared a person's average political knowledge with their primary source of news. The results were surprising: The most knowledgeable groups were viewers of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Hot on their heels? Fans of Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh.
  • Never mind the fact that it's a pretty bad sign when the most politically educated people in the country are relying on either comedy shows or political pundits for their news. The key is that these outlets are primarily about ruthlessly mocking and dismissing the other side. Yet they attract more knowledgeable voters, not less.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • In the world of psychology, they call this attitude polarization; the more times the average person spends thinking about a subject, the more extreme his position becomes -- even if he doesn't run across any new information.
  • once you get to the point where you're rooting so hard for one side of an issue that you're just short of painting your chest in team colors, then all that time spent reading up on the issues stops being about becoming an informed citizen and becomes more about accumulating ammunition for the next argument.
  • #1. We Hate Each Other Over Imaginary Differences
  • For example, a study asked Americans of various demographics and political stances about the ideal way they feel wealth should be distributed across the country. Young or old, male or female, Republican or Democrat, the answers they provided were almost identical.
  • Don't get us wrong; it's not that there are no disagreements, it's just that we vastly overestimate the degree to which we disagree, because the differences are all we focus on.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 24 Mar 11
       
      For instance: During the Obama-McCain debates, their stated foreign policy stance was virtually identical. It was only on matters of how quickly a withdrawal would occur, not whether, if and how. This was almost completely glossed over by the left. In fact, the broad continuance of foreign policy is evidence of a geopolitical 'pull' that exists beyond partisanship and personalities.
  • We don't want the news to just give us information -- we want a story, and every story needs a villain, a battle between good and evil.
  • Knowing this, the news media decades ago started covering politics like a war, or a sport (in the biz, they call it "horse race coverage") where the reporting is entirely about which side is winning -- at the expense of figuring out the actual impact the resulting election or legislation will have on you as a human being. We tune in for "Us vs. Them," so that's what they give us.
anonymous

Your Commute Is Killing You - 2 views

www.slate.com/...all

layscience

shared by anonymous on 10 Jun 11 - Cached
  • This week, researchers at Umea University in Sweden released a startling finding: Couples in which one partner commutes for longer than 45 minutes are 40 percent likelier to divorce.
  • Commuting is a migraine-inducing life-suck—a mundane task about as pleasurable as assembling flat-pack furniture or getting your license renewed, and you have to do it every day.
  • First, the research proves the most obvious point: We dislike commuting itself, finding it unpleasant and stressful.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • That unpleasantness seems to have a spillover effect: making us less happy in general.
  • Long commutes also make us feel lonely.
  • Those stressful hours spent listening to drive-time radio do not merely make us less happy. They also make us less healthy.
  • It is commuting, not the total length of the workday, that matters, he found. Take a worker with a negligible commute and a 12-hour workday and a worker with an hourlong commute and a 10-hour workday. The former will have healthier habits than the latter, even though total time spent on the relatively stressful, unpleasant tasks is equal.
  • overall, people with long commutes are fatter, and national increases in commuting time are posited as one contributor to the obesity epidemic.
  • So, in summary: We hate commuting. It correlates with an increased risk of obesity, divorce, neck pain, stress, worry, and sleeplessness. It makes us eat worse and exercise less. Yet, we keep on doing it.
  • Why do people suffer through it? The answer mostly lies in a phrase forced on us by real-estate agents: "Drive until you qualify."
  • But wait: Isn't the big house and the time to listen to the whole Dylan catalog worth something as well? Sure, researchers say, but not enough when it comes to the elusive metric of happiness. Given the choice between that cramped apartment and the big house, we focus on the tangible gains offered by the latter. We can see that extra bedroom. We want that extra bathtub. But we do not often use them. And we forget that additional time in the car is a constant, persistent, daily burden—if a relatively invisible one.
  • anonymous on 10 Jun 11
     
    "Long commutes cause obesity, neck pain, loneliness, divorce, stress, and insomnia." - By Annie Lowrey - Slate Magazine
anonymous

Ellis Weiner: What I Learned from Parodying Atlas Shrugged - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...arned-from-parod_b_852205.html

humor whimsy objectivism

shared by anonymous on 16 May 11 - Cached
  • Yeah, it's cheap fun, and I expected it going in. But what took me by surprise, and what still amazes me to this very day, is this: The novel's antagonists -- the bad guys, their pernicious "values," the ideas against which Rand's demi-god heroes and heroines do verbose, tedious battle -- they do not exist in real life. Of course, neither do Sauron or Voldemort. But Atlas Shrugged is a 1,000-page, 643,000-(I counted them)-word diatribe against an imaginary enemy that, unlike Lord of the Rings or the Harry Potter books, insists it's about "reality."
  • the geo-political world in which Rand wants us to admire her heroes is not our own, or even (like that of 1984) a plausible, allegorical variant of our own, but a third-rate science fiction dystopian future, complete with imaginary technology, which, by definition, makes comparison to today's world impossible.
  • The U.S. of Atlas Shrugged is about as real and realistic as Narnia, and capitalism is to Atlas Shrugged what Quidditch is to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone: a fictional construct, vaguely similar to something we have in real life, used for purposes of drama and entertainment.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Even Trekkies (do they still call themselves that?) who go to conventions in costume and speak fucking Klingon know that it's make believe.
  • So I wrote the parody. It was like shooting fish in a barrel, yes. But somebody has to shoot them.
  • anonymous on 16 May 11
     
    "In any case, it took me a while to realize what should have been perfectly obvious: that Atlas Shrugged (about which I've written several times in these "pages") was and is so ripe for parody, it's not even funny. It's not even necessary, either, in some ways, since, like all truly horrible books, it parodies itself, brimming and fit to bust as it is with excellent, excellent examples of awful, awful writing. "
anonymous

Images capture moment brain goes unconscious - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...science-environment-13751783

layscience neurology

shared by anonymous on 14 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • As the patient goes under, different parts of the brain seem to be "talking" to each other, a team told the European Anaesthesiology Congress in Amsterdam.
  • they caution that more work is needed to understand what is going on.
  • unconsciousness is a process by which different areas of the brain inhibit each other as the brain shuts down.
  • anonymous on 14 Jun 11
     
    "For the first time researchers have monitored the brain as it slips into unconsciousness. The new imaging method detects the waxing and waning of electrical activity in the brain moments after an anaesthetic injection is administered."
anonymous

Why Rand Never Lost an Argument - 0 views

aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/...-rand-never-lost-argument.html

objectivism criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 19 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • The written evidence, such as it is, demonstrates no very great arguing skill on Rand's part. Quite the contrary, Rand, when she deigns to offer any sort of arguments at all, produces rather poor ones, afflicted with yawning gaps and blistering equivocations.
  • There are several factors which contribue to explaining this anamoly. Rand depended on at least five such factors to provide the varnish of irrefragibility over her otherwise hollow and empirically impoverished arguments.
  • Inability of individuals to evaluate the quality of arguments made on behalf of conclusions they agree with.Intimidation tacticsSelection of debating opponentsReliance on explicit articulation of viewsAvoidance of empirical tests in favor of verbalism
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • (1) Cognitive science and experimental psychology have uncovered reams of evidence that people are not very good at evaluating arguments when they agree with the conclusions.
  • Devotees of Ayn Rand sincerely believe that the Objectivist metaphysics, although based on little more than empty tautologies and other such empirically vacuous truisms, represents the very acme of logical soundness.
  • People tend to believe what they want to believe
  • If only bad arguments are available, they will gravitate toward the best of the bad.
  • Most people become attracted to Objectivism when they are young and without experience either of the world or of philosophical arguments
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 19 Jul 11
       
      This was my experience. Though quite intellectual (seeming) from a very young age, the fact of the matter was that binary, reductionist thinking was a very large part of my intellectual adolescence. I moved from fundamentalist Christianity, to strict Libertarianism, to strict Objectivism, before finally understanding it wasn't the *second* part of those labels that was the real problem - it was the first: fundaminalist... strict... strict...
  • Rand's Objectivist philosophy provides an intriguing set of rationalizations defending an extreme form of secular individualism and egoism coupled with common sense view of reality.
  • (2) For Rand, intimidation became central to maintaining her intellectual dominance over disciples.
  • I learned ... that it didn't pay to be confrontational with [Rand]. If I saw or suspected some inconsistency, I would point it out in calm and even tones, as if it were "no big deal." That way, she would often accept the correction and go on. To expose the inconsistency bluntly and nakedly would only infuriate her
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 19 Jul 11
       
      This has been validated by other writings. Those of poorer stills with verbalization would be absolutely savaged by her.
  • Many of my patients used to tell me that they were terrified to ask questions because of the way Miss Rand might respond to them.
  • I remember many occasions when Rand pounced, assuming that a question was motivated by hostility to her or her ideas, or that the questioner was intellectually dishonest or irrational, or had evil motives, or was her "enemy."
  • A young man asked if her brief characterization of Immanuel Kant's philosophy was accurate, and she exploded that she had not come here to be insulted. I was surprised at the heated tone of her response because he was not antagonistic to her and he had, as I watched him, no glimmer of malice or "gotcha" in his eyes.
  • Rand's anger helped shield her from effective criticism. It encouraged her disciples to be extra cautious when asking questions, which led to many important doctrines in Objectivism remaining unchallenged.
  • Individuals tend to be rather poor at evaluating and criticizing their own beliefs. For this reason, criticism from others is essential for any philosophy that presumes to be rational.
  • Indeed, criticism from others is central to rationality.
  • Rand's refusal to allow herself to be effectively challenged renders her system irrational and dogmatic.
  • (3) Rand not only refused to engage in formal debates with other philosophers and intellectuals, she refused to have anything to do with the two groups which could have challenged her most effectively, namely, conservatives and liberatarians.
  • Her disdain for libertarians is both notorious and perplexing. The reasons for her disdain (which include such trivial reasons as her dislike for the word libertarian) strike one as contrived and superficial, as if they were mere rationalizations.
  • It is not difficult to understand the attraction Ayn Rand has for the uninstructed. She appears, I suppose, to be the spokesman for freedom, for self-esteem, and other equally noble ideals. However, patient examination reveals her pronouncements to be but a shroud beneath which lies the corpse of illogic.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 19 Jul 11
       
      And this is from a member of a movement that's been broadly sympathetic to the spirit, if not the letter, of Objectivism.
  • Rand's hostility (and the subsequent Objectivism policy to avoid libertarians because, as Peikoff once put it, Libertarians are worse than communists) gave her a pretext for avoiding the very group which could offer the most well-informed criticism of her Objectivist philosophy
  • Rand kept her distance from them, as she kept her distance from conservative intellectuals. By doing so, Rand was able to protect herself from just the sort of intellectuals who could have conquered her in debate.
  • Rand never lost an argument, not because she was a great debator, but because she never took on any challenging opponents.
  • (4) Many people do not know how to verbalize their basic beliefs.
  • Regardless of how poor Rand's actual arguments might be, the very fact that she could articulate her beliefs would give her a decisive advantage.
  • (5) In the absence of effective, empirical criticism, debates are determined by factors that have little, if anything to do with the truth.
  • Debates conducted without reference to effective empirical criticism become exercises in verbal facility, where the most aggressive, articulate, personable, and/or witty debator inevitably wins.
  • anonymous on 19 Jul 11
     
    "Sam Anderson, in a review of Anne Heller's biography of Rand, notes: "Eyewitnesses say that [Rand] never lost an argument." Given the poor quality of many of Rand's actual arguments, as one finds them embalmed in her writings, this is a bit of anamoly." You think? :) Another great ARCHN on July 19, 2011
anonymous

Rand & Human Nature 2 - 1 views

aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/...rand-human-nature-2.html

objectivism criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 27 Jul 11 - Cached
Erik Hanson liked it
  • the conscious mind often seeks to rationalize what emerges from the unconscious.
  • Not only do we run alien subroutines [i.e., unconscious processes]; we also justify them. We have ways of retrospectively telling stories about our actions as though the actions were always our [i.e., our conscious mind's] idea.... We are constantly fabricating and telling stories about the alien processes running under the hood.
  • The chicken/shovel experiment led Gazzinga and LeDoux to conclude that the left hemisphere acts as an "interpreter," watching the actions and behaviors of the body and assigning a coherent narrative to these events.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Researchers continually run across subjects who are obviously inventing stories about something they know little about. Whether man is in fact a rational animal, as Rand and her disciples always insisted, is doubtful; but he is very much a rationalizing animal.
  • If rationalization is pervasive, how can one know the truth?
  • Human beings have developed a number of counter-measures to circumvent the strong tendency to rationalization. The most powerful of these counter-measures is openness to criticism.
  • While the individual may not be very good at catching himself in that act of rationalization, he's often pretty shrewd when it comes to detecting it in others. Hence the development of institutions in science and scholarship that use peer review to arrive at truth.
  • While Rand may have been able to detect rationalization in others (which is not very hard), she appears to have been incapable of detecting it in herself.
  • Indeed, the biographical evidence strongly suggests that Rand was intensely committed to a vision of herself that excluded the possibility of rationalization, bias, or any other form of "irrationality."
  • Rand appears to have been strongly invested in the notion that she, unlike many other people, knew how to think rationally, and this meant she was right and everyone who disagreed her was wrong (and perhaps evil as well).
  • This frame of mind closed Rand off to effective criticism and shut up her mind in a series of self-reinforcing loops. Those most prone to rationalization are precisely those most invested in the belief that they are free of such intellectual vices.
  • anonymous on 27 Jul 11
     
    Studies of unconscious brain processes (sometimes called "alien subroutines") reveals a curious phenomenon: the conscious mind often seeks to rationalize what emerges from the unconscious.
anonymous

Can Objectivism Be Criticised? - 0 views

aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/...objectivism-be-criticised.html

objecgtivism criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 04 May 11 - Cached
  • Most of Rand’s critics have probably read her key essays several times over, so if they don’t understand them maybe it’s because Rand isn’t as clear as her acolytes claim.
  • a number of stock objections
  • Theory of Concepts
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Epistemology
  • Rand herself became irate when informed by Joan Blumenthal that the tree she thought she saw outside her hospital window was really an IV pole.
  • Ethics
  • Politics
  • Religion
  • Although Objectivists tell us how stunningly original Rand was, most of her ideas and even the way she defends them are quite similar to other thinkers and schools of philosophy.
  • “Objectivism is a version of empiricism.” As such it is subject to the standard criticisms of empiricism, in particular the difficulty of explaining necessity, mathematics and logic without the aid of a priori knowledge. Another example is Rand’s belief that man’s mind is tabula rasa, which makes it subject to various objections from evolutionary psychology.
  • If an Objectivist historian of science and an Objectivist physicist can’t get issues right in their own field whereas Leonard Peikoff (who has expertise in neither) can, what’s the hope for the rest of us?
  • anonymous on 04 May 11
     
    "Apparently not. Neil Parille plumbs the latest depths of Objectivist apparatchik stupidity so you don't have to."
anonymous

Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature: Rand and Aesthetics 8 - 0 views

aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/...rand-and-aesthetics-8.html

objectivism criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 05 May 11 - Cached
  • Those who assumed that volition applies to will or decisions are in for a bit of shock.
  • Note how Rand here connects Romanticism with her theory of human nature.
  • Man, Rand contended, is a being of "self-made soul"; it is the volitional nature of consciousness that makes him so. Romanticism, therefore, being a volition-orientated school of art, must (by implication at least) portray men as having self-made souls.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Rand's conviction that individuals form their own character is empirically false. Rand presents no compelling evidence in its favor; and there exists plenty of scientific evidence against it.
  • Now if we are to rely upon science and experience to guide us in these matters, it must be admitted that "free will," to the extent that exists at all, is hemmed in all sides by the biological limitations of the human brain.
  • it is not clear that this "agent," whatever it may be, enjoys complete control or even has a will of its own
  • As Nietszche suggested over a hundred years ago, the question is not so much between free will and unfree will, as between strong wills and weak wills.
  • Ultimately, Rand's claim that volition is applicable to both consciousness and existence is merely an eccentric way of formulating her theory of human nature and the benevolent universe premise.
  • anonymous on 05 May 11
     
    "Volition, consciousness, and existence. Rand's contention that Romanticism is a "volition-orientated" school of art offers a curious distinction which, if applied consistently, demonstrates the bankruptcy of Rand's aesthetic categories. Those who assumed that volition applies to will or decisions are in for a bit of shock. According to Rand, volition applies, rather, to consciousness and existence:"
anonymous

The Economic Manhattan Project - 1 views

www.edge.org/...perimeter09_index.html

shared by anonymous on 13 Jul 11 - Cached
  • According to the organizers, "Concerns over the current financial situation are giving rise to a need to evaluate the very mathematics that underpins economics as a predictive and descriptive science. A growing desire to examine economics through the lens of diverse scientific methodologies — including physics and complex systems — is making way to a meeting of leading economists and theorists of finance together with physicists, mathematicians, biologists and computer scientists in an effort to evaluate current theories of markets and identify key issues that can motivate new directions for research."
  • anonymous on 13 Jul 11
     
    "After all, we are witnessing the Waterloo of Wall Street. So, ironically, it was in the Canadian province of Ontario, in the small town of Waterloo, that a meeting was convened to shed new light on the world's financial debacle. In a densely packed conference schedule, the general approach was to take measure of the crisis not only in a new way, but with instruments never used before. Even the venue for event, the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, was itself programmatic, though invitations to participate were sent far beyond the boundaries of economics and physics to mathematicians, lawyers, behavioral economists, risk managers, evolutionary biologists, complexity theorists and computer scientists.- Jordan Mejias, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung"
anonymous

Why Free Markets? - 2 views

bleedingheartlibertarians.com/...why-free-markets

shared by anonymous on 30 Jun 11 - Cached
  • The short answer, which I will assert here and defend below, is that whatever the intent behind government regulation of markets, it almost always ends up working in the interest of the rich and powerful and does little to protect the interest of those with modest means and little access to power.  If a commitment to social justice demands that we care first and foremost about the least well off among us, supporting government regulation may well violate that commitment.
  • why might libertarians, and bleeding heart ones at that, argue that markets should be free of government regulations?
  • As Hayek made clear 66 years ago, the problem we face when try to “construct” an economic order is how to best make use of all of this knowledge, which is dispersed, contextual, and often tacit. 
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Mises and Hayek also argued that because this knowledge is structurally dispersed, contextual and tacit, it cannot be aggregated by government planners and regulators (nor, it’s worth noting, by private actors).
  • So one problem facing regulators is that they lack the knowledge necessary to know what people value and how much, so in deciding what to regulate and how, they are acting on incomplete and often erroneous information.  By trying to override the market, they are substituting a less informationally-rich system for a more rich one.
  • In the face of these repeated failures, it’s very easy to imagine, and there’s plenty of evidence to support it, that regulators and the politicians who oversee them will start to act in their own political self-interest.  Without the ability to make reliable decisions on the objective merits, self-interest will slowly dominate.  Regulators will try to serve the needs of those who will keep them in power and supply them with healthy budgets.  So-called “Capture Theory” explains that it then becomes easy for regulators to be “captured” by the industries they regulate and then regulate in ways that favor the industry.
  • about 75% of antitrust cases are initiated not by the government but by private firms unhappy with how their competition has behaved.  Private actors constantly engage in lobbying and rent-seeking for regulations that will benefit them and/or harm their competition.
  • For me, as an economist, the argument against a great deal of regulation is precisely that it harms the least well off it is trying to help and provides unwarranted privileges for those who need them least. 
  •  Economic systems are inherent unstable, dynamically evolving things.   In studying them, we are always studying a moving target.  To my mind, that makes equilibrium models less generally applicable than is often held to be the case.
  • I have great sympathy for this line of argument, but write to make two points.
  • First, I think the danger of governmental regulation goes beyond the mere possibility of "capture" of the regulatory apparatus by the powerful. The threat is not just this, but that once the authority to regulate is well-established, the state can use this and other economic tools to "buy off" various constitutencies until the opposition to state authority becomes too weak to prevent a very dangerous concentration of power.
  • Second, there is also a purely moral, but non-consequentialist, argument against regulation.
  • That suggests that human institutions - complexity of parts notwithstanding - often exhibit various aggregate patterns of behavior that correlate with measurable variables, and that can be understood and predicted with reasonable degrees of confidence, and thus that the outcomes of various kinds of higher-level global interventions can similarly be predicted with some accuracy.
  • There is no fundamental theoretical difference between states and other large human organizations that would for some reason result in the inability of states to successfully regulate significant fields of aggregate economic behavior as a result of micro-level calculation problems.
  • This is not an argument for any particular regulatory action.  It is an argument that whether these treatments work is an empirical question that cannot be deduced a priori from the kinds of simplified toy models that are wheeled out in an Economics 101 classes or from the armchairs of either libertarian or socialist philosophers.
  • Philosophers are good at the logical and conceptual analysis of conundrums that occur in the theoretical levels of a science.   But when they venture too far into the way the actual world works, they easily lose their bearings due to their surfeit of rationalistic mental habits and intolerance of detail.
  • Property rights are not actualized in the real human world by philosophical ruminations on the state of nature.  They are actualized by courts, and lawmakers, and executives backed up by police and security services - people with guns and other means of enforcing the laws.  There has never been a durable form of human social life where the power to regulate was not "granted."
  • anonymous on 30 Jun 11
     
    "My first post this week led to some interesting discussion in the comments, which has in turn led me to this post. One issue that came up there was, and I paraphrase: "Okay, fine, markets really do benefit the poor, but the dispute between modern liberals and libertarians is not over 'markets' but over 'free markets.' Libertarians don't want the regulations that liberals do and saying that 'markets' help the poor doesn't help us resolve this issue." Fair enough. So why might libertarians, and bleeding heart ones at that, argue that markets should be free of government regulations?"
  • Erik Hanson on 02 Jul 11
     
    I don't know that free markets help the poor so much as they allow more opportunity to the poor. And where free markets lack is in actually funding the poor, where there's a presumption that they deserve poverty.
anonymous

Stress in the city - 0 views

www.labspaces.net/...Stress_in_the_city

layscience urban

shared by anonymous on 22 Jun 11 - Cached
  • A new international study, which involved Douglas Mental Health University Institute researcher Jens Pruessner, is the first to show that two distinct brain regions that regulate emotion and stress are affected by city living.
  • "These findings suggest that different brain regions are sensitive to the experience of city living during different times across the lifespan," says Pruessner. "Future studies need to clarify the link between psychopathology and these affects in individuals with mental disorders.These findings contribute to our understanding of urban environmental risk for mental disorders and health in general. They further point to a new approach to interface social sciences, neurosciences and public policy to respond to the major health challenge of urbanization."
  • anonymous on 22 Jun 11
     
    "Being born and raised in a major urban area is associated with greater lifetime risk for anxiety and mood disorders."
anonymous

How to destroy the Earth - 0 views

qntm.org/destroy

humor science physics funny cool fun space docbadwrench

shared by anonymous on 11 Jul 11 - Cached
  • The Earth is built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you've had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy.
  • I will define our goal thus: by any means necessary, to change the Earth into something other than a planet or a dwarf planet.
  • anonymous on 11 Jul 11
     
    An internet classic. For all of you who want the earth "to not be there anymore" - it's much harder than you've been led to believe (S.D. Hughes, August 24 2006).
anonymous

America's Epidemic of Enlightened Racism - 0 views

www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/...epidemic-of-enlightened-racism

shared by anonymous on 28 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • the summary dismissal of the column – without substantive rebuttals to claims that are so racist as to seem to be beneath public discourse – means that he can play the role of victim of political correctness gone amok.
  • Derbyshire claims that his ideas are backed up by “methodological inquiries in the human sciences,” and includes links to sites that provide all the negative sociological data about black people you’d ever need to justify your fear of them, including the claim that “blacks are seven times more likely than people of other races to commit murder, and eight times more likely to commit robbery.”
  • So he can cast himself as someone who had the courage to tell it like it is – with all the sociological data backing him up – only to be punished for this by the reactionary hypocrites who control the public discourse.
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • Once again, he can tell himself, those quick to cry “racism” have prevented an honest conversation about race.
  • If Derbyshire were a lone crank, none of it would matter much. But he’s not.
  • they see them selves as advocates of a sort of enlightened racism that doesn’t shrink from calling a spade a spade but isn’t inherently unjust.
  • Enlightened racism is meant to escape accusations of being racist in the pejorative sense via two avenues: the first is the appeal to data I have just described. The second is a loophole to the effect that exceptions are to be made for individuals.
  • They could care less about skin color, they say; it really is the content of people’s characters that concerns them, and that content really does suffer more in blacks than whites.
  • Because they are so widespread and aim to restore the respectability of interracial contempt, these attempts at an enlightened racism deserve a rebuttal. Especially in light of the fact that those who hold such views often see themselves as the champions of reasons over sentiment, when in fact their views are deeply irrational.
  • First, a history of slavery, segregation, and (yes) racism, means that African American communities suffer from some social problems at higher rates than whites.
  • But that doesn’t change the fact that the majority of black people – statistically, and not just based on politically correct fuzzy thinking – are employed, not on welfare, have no criminal record, and so on and so forth.
  • So the kind of thinking that enlightened racists see as their way of staring a hard reality right in the face turns out to be just a silly rationalization using weak statistical differences.
  • In other words, one’s chances of being a victim of violent crime is already so low, that even accounting  for higher crime rates among African Americans, one’s chance of being a victim of violent crime by an African American remains very low.
  • The argument that Derbyshire and those like him make is that we are justified in treating an entire population as a threat – in essentially shunning them in the most degrading way – because one’s chances of being harmed by any given member of that population, while very low, is not quite as low as one’s chances of being harmed by the general population.
  • It’s an argument that starts out with sociological data and quickly collapses to reveal the obvious underlying motivation: unenlightened racism of the coarsest variety.
  • Second, there is the issue of character: because this, after all, is what really motivates these attempts at establishing an enlightened racism that gives individuals the benefit of the doubt while acknowledging the truth about general cultural differences.
  • I think it suffices to respond in the following way: people tend to mistake their discomfort with the cultural differences of a group with that group’s inferiority. (They also tend to conflate their political and economic advantages with psychological superiority).
  • If they respond with sociological data about education and birth rates and all the rest, we only have to respond that like crime rates, they’re exactly the sort of consequences one would expect from a history of oppression and even then fail to justify racist stereotypes.
  • The fact is, that where we pick a white person or black person at random, the same truths hold: they very likely have a high school diploma, and probably do not have a bachelor’s degree. They’re probably employed and not on welfare. They’ve probably never been to prison, and they almost certainly are not going to harm you. These are the broad statistical truths that simply do not vary enough between races to justify the usual stereotypes.
  • So here is the hard truth that advocates of enlightened racism need to face: their sociological data and ideas about black character, intelligence and morality are post-hoc rationalizations of their discomfort with average cultural differences between whites and blacks.
  • The fact that they have black friends and political heroes, or give individuals the benefit of the doubt as long as they are “well-socialized” and “intelligent” just means that they can suppress that discomfort if the cultural differences are themselves lessened to a tolerable degree.
  • And so they need to disabuse themselves of the idea that true, unenlightened racism is a term very narrowly defined: that it requires a personal hatred of individual black people based on their skin color despite evidence of redeeming personal qualities.
  • What they think of as redeeming personal qualities are just qualities that tend to make them less uncomfortable. But the hatred of black culture and post-hoc rationalizations of this hatred using sociological data are just what racism is.
  • This is not to say that mere discomfort with cultural difference is the same thing as racism (or xenophobia). Such discomfort is unavoidable: You’d have this sort of discomfort if you tried live in a foreign country for a while, and you’d be tempted by the same sorts of ideas about how stupid and mean people are for not doing things the way you’re used to.
  • strange customs become “stupid” because they reflect less of ourselves back to us than we’re used to.
  • That lack of reflection is felt not only as a distressing deprivation of social oxygen, but as an affront, a positive discourtesy.
  • The mature way to deal with such discomfort is to treat it as of a kind with social anxiety in general: people are strange, when you’re a stranger. Give it some time, and that changes. But it won’t change if you develop hefty rationalizations about the inferiority and dangerousness of others and treat these rationalizations as good reasons for cultural paranoia.
  • Americans seem to have difficulty engaging in the required reflective empathy, and imagining how they would feel if they knew that every time they walked into a public space a large number of a dominant racial majority looked at them with fear and loathing. They might, under such circumstances, have a bad day.
  • anonymous on 28 Mar 14
     
    From Nick Lalone in Buzz. "John Derbyshire has been fired from the National Review for an openly racist column on how white people should advise their children with respect to "blacks": for the most part, avoid them. Because on the whole, they are unintelligent, antisocial, hostile, and dangerous. Or as he puts it, avoid "concentrations of blacks" or places "swamped with blacks," and leave a place when "the number of blacks suddenly swells," and keep moving when "accosted by a strange black" in the street. The language is alarmingly dehumanizing: black people come in "swamps" and "concentrations" (and presumably also in hordes, swarms, and just plain gangs). And it's clearly meant to be a dismissal of the notion - much talked about recently in light of the Trayvon Martin shooting - that African Americans should be able to walk down the street without being shunned, much less attacked."
« First ‹ Previous 141 - 156 of 156
Showing 20▼ items per page